C, now leading my local liberal activist
group, posted a meme from 8 Bit Communism:
What’s your favorite place that isn’t real?
Fantasy land and sea map of Hyrule.
Mushroom Kingdom of Mario Brothers.
Vice City in neon pink letters. And
Israel. You work to breathe. You feel the
hearts stop of the millions of people. Your
cousins and their cousins. All those U.S. tax
dollars, going… where, exactly? M, the
mother of a friend of my son’s, asks me while
we kill time walking around the soccer field,
So, what is going on in Gaza? I don’t
understand. The deep breath, the telling
about the meme and its offense. An hour of
summarizing the last century as I clip-hop
next to her long legs which are speedwalking
us out of range of hearing of the kids then
back in their territory. The next day, C shares
a story with the world titled, “Make Israel
Palestine Again,” the little blue privacy icon
of our planet next to his post showing only
North and South America, and I scroll, keep
scrolling and scrolling, beyond the newsfeed,
past the suburbs with their black-and-white
balls and nets, over the river of small children
in their neon shirts, at a distance from the
dark-suited U.N. motions, a long way off
from the demands of all my breathing and
unbreathing kin.
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Josette Akresh-Gonzales has been published in Atticus Review, JAMA, The Pinch, The Journal, Breakwater, PANK, and many other journals. A recent poem has been included in the anthology Choice Words (Haymarket). She co-founded the journal Clarion and was its editor for two years. Tweets @Vivakresh
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